We’re getting ready to roll out the first change outlined in Mario’s blog post on multiple collections per account to Visual Studio Team Services (VSTS). This change will merge the Account and Collection concepts. In early April this change will roll out for newly created accounts; in late April it will be applied to all existing accounts.

Merging these concepts is the first step towards introducing a new logical entity called Organizations. Organizations will provide a way to logically group VSTS accounts which will provide many benefits, such as org wide licenses and the ability to set policies for all Accounts centrally from an organization.

So what does this change mean to customers that currently have accounts on Visual Studio Team Services? To start, this change will NOT have any impact on any of your day-to-day activities. However, those with a keen eye will notice a few changes.

First, “DefaultCollection” disappears from the account URL. Naturally stating that we’re changing the format of our URLs can make some feel uneasy about the potential impacts this might have. Any existing link that has “DefaultCollection” in it will be 100% supported after the change and will continue to be supported for a long time to come. Rest assured the removal of Default Collection will have ZERO IMPACT on any:

• Bookmarked URLs
• Existing tools that use our APIs
• Visual Studio connections to your Account(s)
• Any Git remotes that have been configured

Second, the Control Panel settings have been merged in with the collection settings. Control Panel will still appear on administrative pages, but it’s no longer a clickable link. We’ve moved account settings and agent queues down to the same level as the other Collection level settings. Now you can access all Account and Collection level settings by simply accessing the administrative experience.

As you can see we’re taking this journey one step at a time. Watch for continued updates on our blog regarding our progress, experience flows, guidance, and other information. We look forward to hearing from you along the way!